Just finished reviewing the galley proofs of my first novel. My first published novel. I’ve been writing for a long time, since I was in my 20s. I actually started earlier, as a kid writing letters that were rarely answered. My first readers were disinterested friends and family members. Maybe that’s where I learned how to hold an audience. Most of my early writing had an audience of one. I discovered journaling and keep up that written practice with this blog. I registered with the original Blogger from Pyra Press in 2001 and posted my first weblog in November 2005. I began blogging regularly in January 2006.
But back to the novel. The title is “Zeppelins
Over Denver” and it will be out in May from The Ridgeway Press of Michigan in Detroit.
Publisher and friend M.L. Liebler helped me get the ball rolling and I am
forever grateful. Small presses rule! Big presses are great too but they have
spent a lot of time ignoring me. C’est la vie! I was learning how to
write all of this time, from the early 1970s until now. I’m still learning. Always
will be.
“Zeppelins” is a historical novel set in
1919 Denver. Its origins lie on the yellowing pages of my paternal grandmother’s
diary from her time as a U.S. Army nurse in France, 1918-19. She kept one diary
in her lifetime and it was lost for decades, existing only as a rumor that
faded with each passing year. It was rediscovered in my sister Molly’s basement
in Tallahassee. She’s a nurse like our mother and my father’s mother. Eileen,
another sister who also was a nurse, took the diary and transcribed it. She
asked me for editorial assistance. As writer and editor, I gladly
provided it. I whipped it into shape, working more as a conservator than a fiction
writer. I corrected spelling and punctuation. I changed no contents, censored
nothing. It was lovely just the way it was.
Eileen asked me to put together a little
book for the family. Along the way, I researched the service of army nurses in
the Great War and the Great War itself. I thought I knew at least some of the
history. I had read war novels such as “All Quiet on the Western Front,” “The
Good Soldier Schweik,” “Soldier of the Great War,” and “Winter Soldier.” I had read “The Guns of August” by Barbara
Tuchman and Paul Fussell’s excellent “The Great War and Modern Memory.” I’ve
read the poetry: Wilfred Owen, Siegried Sassoon, and Robert Graves. I have read
some of the celebratory war poetry, too. Joyce Kilmer’s
“Trees" was my father’s favorite poem. I wondered if Dad had contemplated
the shattered trees in the Bulge battlefield in the Ardennes in 1944. Kilmer’s
reputation lives on at Columbia University’s annual Alfred Joyce Kilmer
Memorial Bad Poetry Contest. The Columbia Daily Spectator once ranked
the contest as number one among the “Best Columbia Arts Traditions.”
The more I read, the more I realized how little I knew. I dug deeper. In the end, I decided to absorb everything I knew and let it come out in what I see as a historical novel colored by the darkly humorous war novels of Joseph Heller, Juroslav Hasek, and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. And there you have it. Ten years of work poured into almost 400 pages. I hope you enjoy it. If you are inspired by the characters, some of them will return in the sequel, “Patrick of the Mountains.” The draft manuscript is complete and it will be published once the edits and revisions are complete. I have roughed out a plot for a third novel but we will see where that goes.
